The dolls, which can cost more than $12,000 (but often sell for several hundred or a few thousand dollars) have extremely realistic hair and incredibly lifelike facial features and skin tone, thanks to many hours spent by artists who paint them, complete with one-of-a-kind birthmarks-and painstakingly apply their locks and lashes.

Some of the dolls are made to look exactly like premature babies and delivered with an incubator and even with IVs.

Wow. That sounds a little…well, who am I to judge?

Some younger women claim the dolls satisfy their maternal needs. Some middle-aged women claim the dolls comfort them as their children leave for college. Indeed, companies will supply custom-made dolls that closely resemble a woman's own baby-born twenty years before.

It would be one thing if women were buying "reborn dolls" out of morbid curiosity or a passion to collect them (like Hummel figurines). But women are taking their dolls out in strollers (no kidding) and strapping them into car seats for trips to the mall.

Fortunately, they don't actually believe their "babies" are real.
That would be a true psychotic delusion. But they are able to suspend disbelief and play with them as though they are real-kind of like believing in a movie while you are watching it…

According to the Reborn Dolls website, you can also add other "ideas" such as "heartbeat, magnetic dummy and magnetic hair ribbon."

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And you thought your childhood friendship with My Buddy was kind of intense.